Re-Viewed: Kathryn Bigelow's vampire gem Near Dark

Near Dark opens with a close-up of a mosquito siphoning blood from an arm. Like the vampires - who, notably, are never referred to as such in the film - that haunt the velvet shadows of Kathryn Bigelow's 1987 picture, the mosquito feeds on blood in order to exist, no more, no less. But another comparison presents itself.

"When we realized we were going to have a live mosquito interact with one of our actors, we had to grow that mosquito so that there were no contaminants. That was a six-month process," Bigelow tells us on the DVD commentary. The same applies to the movie's mythology. Near Dark strips away gothic elements (crucifixes, holy water, stakes through hearts) and supernatural hokum (transformations into bats, etc) to offer a spare tale of love, family and survival. It's a vampire movie, but clean and purpose-built.

Back in the mid-'80s, Bigelow wanted to make a western. Realizing oaters were commercial suicide and that she needed a bankable project to tempt producers into letting her direct solo (she'd co-directed 1981's The Loveless with Monty Montgomery), she spliced her western with horror, the boom genre of the time, and threw in elements of film noir and road movie for good measure.

The story, however, was simple: Oklahoma farm boy Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) is bitten by Mae (Jenny Wright), a mysterious stranger who blows through his tumbleweed town one breathless night. Mae's makeshift family - surrogate parents Jessie and Diamondback (Lance Henriksen and Jenette Goldstein), bad boy 'big brother' Severen (Bill Paxton) and adult-trapped-in-a-child's-body Ishmael (Joshua Millar) ­- reluctantly take Caleb into their nomadic clan, teaching him to feed. Caleb's father, meanwhile, chases him down to save his soul.

Mae (Jenny Wright) and Caleb (Adrian Pasdar)

Released just two months after Warner Bros' heavily-marketed smash hit The Lost Boys, Near Dark lasted barely two weeks in cinemas. Though made in 40-odd days (well, nights) for just $5m, it was a flop, its moody visuals and narcotic atmosphere proving quite the comedown after Kiefer Sutherland's garish troupe had partied all night to prove, as the tagline pointed out, that it's fun to be a vampire.

Or perhaps audiences didn't want another vampire film about a handsome young guy getting nipped by a beautiful woman and taken into a hostile vampire clan - the plots, if not the tones, were identical. Whatever the reason, Bigelow's picture took under $3.5m. But it refused to stay dead, with strong word of mouth finding it an audience on video.

Viewed now, it's the style that most impresses, with Adam Greenberg's soft-edged images and Tangerine Dream's woozy score lending a seductive warmth to the summer nights, and the decision to shoot a third of the film at magic hour allowing tender light to suffuse the horizons. "I'm dreamin'," murmurs Caleb when he first spies Mae, and the entire movie has a chimerical quality, untethered from reality.

Bigelow, who had admired Greenberg's night-time lighting on The Terminator and describes his Near Dark compositions as "a painting, a beautiful, muted Cézanne", said she wanted to make something "romantic and sensual". Near Dark is exactly that, right down to its sparse, poetic dialog: "I'll still be here when the light from that star gets down to Earth," Mae tells Caleb on their first meeting. (It says a lot for the magic of movies that this July-set scene was filmed in October, on a snowy night; the woefully under-dressed Pasdar and Wright had to try not to shiver and sucked on ice to prevent their breath steaming.)

Not that the film is without humor, violence and set-pieces. Forever on the move, the family frenziedly spray paint windows and tape them over with tinfoil as they speed out of towns with dust and carnage in their wake, and there's a spontaneous combustion scene to rival Cronenberg's famous head-splat in Scanners. Best of all, though, is the center-piece bar fight, the clan gorging not on heaving-bosomed virgins but pock-faced, whiskey-soaked rednecks. "We had to build the bar from scratch so we could destroy it," recalls Bigelow, and her cast took her at her word.

"Finger-lickin' good!" howls Severen as he struts and gluts, with Paxton's mesmerising energy perhaps explained by the B12 injection he took prior to shooting in an effort to quash a migraine. We might not see any elongated incisors in Near Dark, but the cast sure sink their teeth into the furniture during this boisterous scene.

Now, of course, vampires are de rigueur, with the Twilight movies and Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive, plus TV shows True Blood and The Vampire Diaries, continuing to tweak mythology long after Near Dark invited in the likes of The Addiction (1995), From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) and Blade (1998).

And now, of course, Bigelow is an Oscar-winning director, her genre days (Blue Steel, Point Break, Strange Days) seemingly behind her as she wages her own war on terror (The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty). But Near Dark remains a highlight, both of the director's career and of the genre that she so carefully recalibrated. "You haven't met any girls like me before," Mae tells Caleb. We still haven't.

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Joshua John in Near Dark (1987)
Copyright: Rex Features Moviestore Collection
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